Tuesday, 27 July 2010

I loved this challenge - though I made more mistakes than I would have liked. Instead of making a bowl shaped dessert lined with individual slices of swiss roll, I decided to make what looks like one big slice of swiss roll. It's a dark chocolate and espresso roll filled with coffee marscarpone cream...

But what's inside? Well, working from the top down, we have dark chocolate and brown sugar ice cream, fleur de sel caramel ice cream, hot fudge sauce with a hint of coffee and then more caramel ice cream and then more chocolate ice cream. Yum.

(Also, that's sugar from rolling it on the outside, not frost!)

The odd thing about this was that I spent ages planning it and thinking of how I could make sure it rolled smoothly round the edge, how I could make the swirl look perfect on top... and then when it came down to it, I rushed and fudged several things. Very annoying.

The brown sugar and dark chocolate ice cream is an adaption of the Rich Chocolate Ice Cream I made before. It's smooth and rich without being overwhelming.

The fleur de sel caramel ice cream is taken from David Lebovitz's blog, here - I didn't have salted butter so I used unsalted and added a whole teaspoon of fleur de sel. I made the whole recipe but half would have more than adequate for this cake. I contemplated writing the recipe out below, but decided that David's instructions are so good you might as well get them at his site. This ice cream is so so delicious, if a little gloopy for these purposes. Still, yum. Yum. Make it!

As I was making a chocolate roll, I tried the original recipe from the challenge. Unfortunately it didn't really work for me - it was thin and floppy and didn't taste of much. This was almost definitely my fault, but I decided to go for a different recipe as I didn't have time to mess up again. I went for Delia's Swiss Roll recipe, adapting it by adding cocoa powder and espresso. I also couldn't face not creaming the butter and sugar first, although it's an all-in-one recipe. It's very different from the DB recipe and much more like a normal cake - it has butter and egg yolks etc.

Thankfully this recipe worked out well, though it was a little bit thick. Once I had tipped it out onto the sugared paper, I cut it in half lengthways. Then I rolled it into the cake tin I had prepared with cling film. Unfortunately I wasn't really concentrating and it cracked slightly in a few places.

I then cut small strips from the other half and started rolling them around to create the top of the slice, adding the marscarpone as I went. Then it went into the freezer for a half an hour or so to set before I added the layers of ice cream and the hot fudge, chilling well between each addition.

Unfortunately, with the first layer of the caramel ice cream, I let it melt a bit too much before spooning (pouring...) it in. It spread through to the bottom of the cake and soaked parts of it, resulting it in not looking as pretty as hoped and my having to use another lot of ice cream as the rest had melted away. It also screwed up the look of the swirl on the top, taking out some of the definition. As a result, I had to pipe/smooth another layer of marscarpone on the top of the cake.

Above was the moment of truth... when I realised how much damage I had done by adding the ice cream when it was too liquid. Rookie mistake, I know.

Still, this tasted fantastic and I was really pleased with the flavour profile. I'd like it to look a lot neater. All in all, though, a great challenge - I was already making lots of ice cream but I wouldn't have thought of making this without Sunita and the DB's.

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

For the brown sugar and chocolate ice cream, see this post and replace the sugar with brown sugar.

For the fleur de sel caramel ice cream, see David's post about it, here.

For the coffee marscarpone:

150g marscarpone

1 1/2 tbsp icing sugar

1 tbsp espresso powder

1 tbsp boiling water

Beat the marscarpone in a bowl a little to loosen it. Sieve over the icing sugar and beat in. Mix the boiling water and espresso powder together then add to the bowl and beat in. Put in the fridge until needed.

For the cake:

50g softened butter

110g caster sugar

2 large eggs

90 g plain flour

20g cocoa powder

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp hot water

1 tbsp espresso powder

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F. Grease an then line a swiss roll tin, making sure it comes up the sides and the paper is well greased too. Put the butter and sugar into a mixer and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and sift in the flour, baking powder and cocoa. Beat until just combined. Mix the hot water and espresso powder and then fold into the mixture. Spread evenly into the tin, making sure it reaches the corners.

Bake for about 12 minutes or until it is springy to the touch in the middle. Meanwhile place a large piece of baking parchment on a surface and sprinkle with extra caster sugar. When you take the cake out of the oven, loosen the edges from the paper and then flip out onto the sugared surface. Cut all the edges off. At this point, either follow a traditional method with the coffee marscarpone, or start to line the tin with the cake for this ice cream cake.

For the fudge sauce (half batch of DB recipe):

100g caster sugar

1 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp cornflour

1 1/2 tsp espresso powder

180ml water

1/2 tbsp butter

Whisk together the sugar, cocoa, cornflour, espresso powder together with the water in a small saucepan. Stir until the sauce thickens - about 2 minutes. Stir in the butter and leave to cool.

Well done, such a clever interpretation of the challenge. I made DL's caramel ice-cream and found that it melted much faster than the other ice-cream. I think it's to do with the sugar content (he says so in the recipe).

Oh, wow! I don't know where to start...I love the flavors you used! I'm sure it tastes like piece of heaven. And the shape, so original! By the looks of it, I'd never say you had any trouble assembling it. It looks perfect. Great job and a great blog. I'll be stopping by more often :)